Tag: federal agencies
The House Republicans Who’ve Had Enough
House Republicans didn’t exactly have a banner year in 2023. They made history for all the wrong reasons. Last January, they presided over the most protracted election for speaker in a century, and nine months later, for good measure, lawmakers ejected their leader, Kevin McCarthy, for the first time ever. Last month, the House expelled one of its own, George Santos, for only the sixth time.
The rest of the year wasn’t any more productive. Thanks in part to
What Puerto Rico Needs Most
President Joe Biden recently visited Puerto Rico and Florida in an effort to reassure the people there that the U.S. government would help them in the aftermath of Hurricanes Fiona and Ian. But a key difference between those two places—Puerto Rico is a “commonwealth” and Florida is a state—means each faces a very different path to recovery.
Days after Hurricane Fiona struck Puerto Rico, the writer Jaquira Díaz flew back to her home to check on her family and see
The Most Important Civil Servants You’ve Never Heard Of
Inspectors general have been referred to as the most powerful public officials you’ve never heard of. In fact, IGs are a crucial part of our democratic system’s checks and balances: They expose government misconduct, fraud, and abuse, and they promote transparency in government operations. Over the years, IGs have uncovered wasteful expenditures in pandemic-relief funding, investigated alleged misconduct by the secretary of Veterans Affairs, and brought to light the FBI’s misuse of sensitive national-security letters.
Of course, IGs are
The Supreme Court’s EPA Ruling Is Going to Be Very, Very Expensive
Today’s major environmental ruling from the Supreme Court, West Virginia v. EPA, is probably most notable for what it did not do.
It did not say that the Environmental Protection Agency is prohibited from regulating heat-trapping carbon pollution from America’s existing power plants.
It also did not strip the EPA of its ability to regulate climate pollution at all.
In short, it did not, as some progressives feared, blast away any possibility of using the federal government’s environmental powers
Johnny McEntee: The Man Behind the Man Behind January 6
In late October 2020, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was attending the confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett when his cellphone rang. He answered with a whisper and walked out to the hallway to take the call. What was so urgent as to pull the chief of staff out of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing just two weeks before a presidential election?
On the line was Andrew Hughes, the top staffer at the Department of Housing and